Would you call God
of Small Things as a Novel of Protest?
“Roy’s book is the only one I can
think of among Indian novels in English which can be comprehensively described
as a protest novel. It is all about atrocities against minorities, Small
Things: children and youth, women and untouchables.”
– Ranga Rao
Arundhati
Roy’s The God of Small Things is a path breaking novel in as much as
after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children. This is the first
book that created quite a few ripples in the socio-moral as well as literary
pool in India for more than one reasons, a) The
God of Small Things raised
certain pertinent questions and slapped them on the traditional patriarchal
society to explore their answers b) Roy broke all the norms to accommodate the
feminine principle, c) The
God of Small Things became
the mouthpiece of the subaltern in terms of its open and defiant concern for
the untouchable and the marginalized in the person of Velutha and Ammu.
Roy
told one of her interviewers: “Writing The
God of Small Things was a fictional
way of making sense of the world I lived in.”Critics like Dr. B. N. Singh have
taken note of its predominantly female pattern. The narrative in The God of Small Things is not linear. Rahel and Estha’s
reading the posters backwards is the breaking of patriarchal conventions. The
novel itself persuades the readers that it be read backwards. Howell’s analysis
of the feminist mode of writing may well be applied to Roy’s novels:
“Perhaps
the commonest feature of woman’s resistance to tradition is their mixing of
genre codes- like those of gothic, romance, history, gossip and Christian
fable……..the difference here is that those stories are all told from the
women’s angle, registering a feminized of dislocation within the very tradition
in which they are writing.”
